Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Horace and Mike: Cookin’ at the Continental

Horace Silver was the subject of an earlier feature on JazzProfiles which you can locate via this link.

My favorite among Horace’s many Blue Note albums is Finger Poppin’ which contains his original composition – Cookin’ at the Continental.

Mike Abene, the renown Jazz composer-arranger, scored Cookin’ at the Continental for the GRP All-Star Big Band, and we have used this version as the audio track for the following video tribute to Horace.

The first time I heard Mike’s arrangement of the tune, I was surprised by the fact the he took Horace’s solo from the original recording and arranged it for the entire band – no mean feat!

As Mike explains: “It’s a great solo that he plays on that, so I had a couple of friends, Bill Kirchner and Andy Boehmke, transcribe Horace’s solo and I used it for the ensemble. By using the solo as an ensemble line and kind of expanding the harmony a little, it puts the song in a new perspective. The hardest part for me was trying to orchestrate Horace’s solo, because since it’s a piano solo, it covers six octaves.”

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Lessons in Jazz: Movement and Momentum in Jazz Drumming

As you watch this demonstration video, notice how little movement there is as Evan Hughes works his way around the drums replicating Philly Joe Jones' four bar solo exchanges with the horns on "No Room For Squares." Notice, too, how the patterns of the syncopation he incorporates into his solos keeps the momentum of the piece moving forward, i.e., swinging. Jazz drumming is about making music. It is not about showing off technique. Close your eyes and listen to the complexity of the drum solos; then open them and see how this complexity comes from simple forms and economy of movement.

www.jazzleadsheets.com

Lessons in Jazz

How To Listen To What's Happening In The Music - John Swana - "Philly Jazz"

This piece was originally written for a friend to help him follow along with what was happening in the music.

The tune is Philly Jazz. It was written by trumpeter John Swana who, as you would imagine, hails from Philadelphia, and it appears on his On Target Criss Cross CD [1241]. Joining with him on the album are Dutch guitarist Jesse van Ruller, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Eric Harland.

After reading a brief introduction about how the tuneis structured, just follow the timings listed under each musician’s name under the video, open your ears and you’ll hear it all fall into place. You can always pause or re-set the video if you lose your place or wish to hear something again.

Philly Jazz is a typical 32-bar tune that is formed around four [4], eight [8]-bar sections.

This song structure is often referred to as “A-A-B-A.”

This first “A” = 8 bars or measures of the theme or melody [0-7 seconds of the video]

The second “A” = 8 bars or measures of the theme or melody repeated [8-14 seconds].

“B” = 8 bars or measures of an alternative melody sometimes called the release or the bridge [15-20 seconds]

The third “A” = 8 bars of the theme or melody restated [21-27 seconds].

Philly Jazz’s entire 32-bar A-A-B-A configuration is thus heard in the first 27 seconds of the video.

The melody and the related chords for the A-A-B-A song structure then become the basis upon which subsequent improvisations are developed; in this case by Swana, then by van Ruller and lastly by Harland: first in conjunction with Swana and van Ruller and then he solos alone. Patitucci does not solo on Philly Jazz.

To put it another way, the musicians repeat the 32 bar A-A-B-A sequence, each time making up and super-imposing new melodies on the tune’s chord progressions.

Every time a musician completes a 32-bar improvisation, this is referred to as a “chorus.”

Following these solos, the tune’s A-A-B-A pattern is repeated at 5:39 [A], 5:45 [A], 5:51 [B] and 5:58 [A], thus closing the track.

We thought it might be fun to post a listing of the timings for the tune and the improvised choruses to help you better hear what’s going in the music.

To make things a little less confusing, the first two “A’s” or 16 bars of each chorus have been combined.

So John Swana’s first chorus’ A/A = 28-40 seconds, its B = 41-46 and its last 8 = 47-54 seconds.

At this point, you may wish to “Play” the YouTube and follow along with the timings noted below it. Don’t be concerned about scrolling below the video’s images while you are checking the track timings as you can always go back and watch it again later once your ear is trained!

Lessons in Jazz

Bill Evans - On Developing His Own Voice

Jazz Master Class No. 3 - "Explorations"

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“At the core of [Bill] Evans’s thought was the abandonment of the root to the bass. He commented: “If I am going to be sitting there playing roots, fifths, and full voicings, the bass is relegated to a time machine. He was not the first. to adopt this strategy. As far back as the mid-forties Ahmad Jamal had experimented in this way, and through the fifties Erroll Garner, Red Garland, and others took individual plunges into this uncharted rootless territory.

Evans's achievement lay in consolidation, in the creation of a self-sufficient left-hand language—a "voicing vernacular" peculiarly his own—based on the logical progression of one chord to the next while involving the minimum movement of the hand. This resulted in a continuity of sound in the middle register (still implied even when momentarily broken) that opened up areas for invention not only above but below it. The pianist's left hand spent much of its time around middle C, a good clean area of the piano where harmonic clusters are acoustically clearest. Thus was paved the way for the bass player's contrapuntal independence, an opportunity seized by Scott LaFaro.

As exhibited freely on Explorations, Evans's very personal "locked-hands" technique had now attained a fully formed order. Exploratory right-hand lines were shadowed by left-hand harmonies suspended from and carried by the singing, leading voice, the choice and tone of each note consummately judged. The whole moved as a loping unit, a unified concept in which the harmonic cushion was harnessed to the rhythmic contour of the top line. "Sweet and Lovely" offers a superb example, the chordal solo adding a harmonic zest, twice removed, to the background sequence.

Evans could sustain entire choruses in this way with apparent ease, and the phenomenon was his most striking contribution to the language of piano jazz. But it was an element of style—the personal aspect of playing that he was at pains to avoid teaching at Lenox, for fear of encouraging the mimicry of an idiom rather than the emergence of that idiom from the student's own creative spirit. Individuality of style, Evans believed, must be arrived at through the application of fundamental principles, as he himself had done ever since trying to become a jazz musician. Precisely by working at the essence of his material had he arrived at a stylistic dialect through which to express it.” [Peter Pettinger, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, pp. 105-106]

Lessons in Jazz

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style—creating your own style. Once you've created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn't gone and where it can go— and that's innovation.”

—Walter Bishop Jr.

“Many beginners select as their exclusive idol one major figure in jazz. They copy that idol's precise vocabulary, vocabulary usage, and tune treatment, striving to improvise in the idol's precise style. Progress toward such a goal is necessarily gradual; at times, it is barely evident to the aspiring performer. In many cases, it is through encounters with veterans that they notice signs of significant advancement. Bobby Rogovin remembers his astonishment and pride the day a friend of trumpeter Donald Byrd burst into Rogovin's practice studio and called out Byrd's name, having mistaken Rogovin's performance for that of his mentor. A saxophonist once received unexpected praise when musicians, having heard his improvisations filter through the walls of a neighboring apartment, inquired about the title of the Charlie Parker recording they thought they had just overheard. One anecdote that epitomizes a student's awareness of his own success concerns a young artist—a skilled "copier"—who once approached his idol on the bandstand during the latter's uninspired performance and declared with irony, "Man, you ain't you. I'm you."1

Although encouraging students initially to follow a particular musical master and acknowledging the discipline required of faithful understudies, seasoned improvisers ultimately view such achievements as limited. Curtis Fuller feels that it is "great for a musician to walk in the shoes of the fisherman" because imitation is a great compliment, but, he cautions, "I wouldn't want to lose my personality or shut down my development that way." Otherwise, he says, "I wouldn't have enhanced what's been done before. I would rather be an extension than a retention."

Direct counsel reinforces this view within the jazz community. It helped to be in an environment with "Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, and others who were so creative and like-minded," Max Roach admits. "We had all been instructed that to make an imprint of your own, you had to discover yourself. We fed off of each other, but encouraged each other to do

things that were individual." Everyone studied "the classics, like Bud studied Art Tatum," but they were aware of the "danger of concentrating so much on someone else's style that it was becoming predominant" in their own playing.

Some view too close an imitation of a master as an ethical issue. Arthur Rhames stopped trying to duplicate "exactly what other artists played" because he realized that "they were all playing out of their experiences, their lives— the things that happened to them." Even though he could "relate in a general way to most of it," he decided that jazz performance is "too personal" to try to duplicate exactly what other artists "were saying." There was, moreover, the spectre of imitators deliberately or inadvertently taking credit for musical ideas not original with them, or exhausting the professional jobs their mentors might otherwise have acquired. "He's living on Eddie Jefferson," George Johnson Jr. heard people say of him after he had absorbed his mentor's style. This did not really "hurt" Johnson's feelings at the time, because he was glad that others could relate him to "somebody." At the same time, he knew that he could not keep singing Jefferson's material because people would conclude that he was merely a "mimic."

Ultimately, Max Roach recalls, it was only after aspiring players had devoted years to developing their "own musical personality" that experts began "to look at you, to single you out and select you for their bands." Lester Young and others in Roach's early circle advised artists with cleverly rhymed aphorisms like "You can't join the throng 'til you write your own song."

One of the ways in which learners modify an initial mentor's influence is by studying the styles of other artists, a practice that is a natural outgrowth of their growing appreciation for the larger tradition of jazz. Barry Harris and his peers each had a particular idol, but as they grew they began "to see out a little bit." Suddenly, they stopped "idolizing" and listened "to all the giants." They realized that their tradition was "bigger than Bird, bigger than Bud Powell, much bigger than any of them." Even the greatest artists "hadn't done it all." Some youngsters, not intent upon exclusive apprenticeships, adopt this perspective from the start, absorbing features from different mentors through saturated listening, aural analysis, and transcription.” Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, [University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 120-121; Emphasis mine]

Lessons in Jazz

"Jazz can't be taught, but it can be learned." - Paul Desmond, alto saxophonist

This Jazz Master Class feature is new to the blog and may be a recurring one. Please let me know your thoughts about it by dropping me a note at scerra@roadrunner.com. Thanks.

“As learners endeavor to internalize the language of jazz, matters of physical constitution, relative mastery over instruments, and hearing acuity begin to dictate choices of material. Young pianists are literally able to grasp only those voicings of a mentor that lie within reach on the keyboard, just as young trumpeters are restricted to those patterns of an idol that require only moderate flexibility and strength to execute. When John McNeil discovered that he "didn't have the technique to copy Miles Davis's performance on E.S.P." he pursued an alternative course, "copping a lot from guys like Nat Adderley who were easier to hear—the stuff he played based on a blues scale especially. Also Chet Baker, when he wasn't moving fast, since he played real simple."

Another youngster, who yearned to improvise like John Coltrane, described months of concentrated study before he could perform "just a few phrases" from a Coltrane solo. At the peak of his frustration, the student was calmed by a dream in which Coltrane appeared to him and offered gentle encouragement: "You're doing fine; just keep it up." The student adds that Coltrane "made the phrases sound so easy on the record." It was not until he tried to learn them that he realized "how difficult they were to play, let alone to have thought up in the first place." Naivete occasionally proves to be an asset in negotiating the gulf between student and master. No one had explained to Gary Bartz how difficult Charlie Parker solos were, so he simply copied them along with those of lesser masters.

Faced with an idol's inaccessible vocabulary patterns, learners may adopt various tacks, for example, transposing the patterns into keys less difficult for them to perform. In Miles Davis's case, he played Dizzy Gillespie's figures in the middle and lower register of the trumpet because initially he could not perform or "hear music"—that is, imagine it precisely—in the trumpet's highest register as could Gillespie. Grappling with these limitations drives home to youngsters that they must gain such physical control over their instruments that their musical knowledge literally lies beneath their fingertips. As J. J. Johnson pointedly advised David Baker in his youth, "Any idea that you can't get out the other end of your horn is of absolutely no value in this music."

The most fundamental use of jazz vocabulary, then, requires the ability to perform patterns in time and at various tempos. This in turn requires learners to cultivate various technical performance skills tied to physical strength and agility. After George Duvivier trained himself to use two and three fingers for playing bass in his "solo work," his increased flexibility to reach across wide intervals on the same string and adjacent strings enabled him "to play ridiculous tempos without getting tired" and to play "groups of notes you can't possibly play with one [finger] because you can't move the finger back [to the next position] in time."

[Guitarist] Emily Remler recalls going "through just such a frustration. I'd go to a session, not be able to express myself on guitar, and cry afterwards—I was so miserable. My technique was lousy, and my time was bad. My time was bad basically because I couldn't get to the phrases in time." Remler's frustration led to an intensive practicing binge known among musicians as woodshedding. She withdrew temporarily from the jazz community and subjected herself to a musical discipline that necessarily carried over into other aspects of her lifestyle. "I played and practiced the guitar constantly, five hours a day. At one point, I went down to the Jersey shore and locked myself in a room for a month. I lost twenty pounds, stopped smoking, and became a serious guitar player. It took a lot of muscle building to reach the point where I got a really strong and full sound on the guitar. I practiced my tail off trying to play octaves and different things to build up my muscles." After months of practice, Remler began to overcome her problems. Eventually, she developed a "reservoir of technique" that she was able to "tap" for many years.” Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, [University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 114-115]

Jazz: America's Classical Music

Grover Sales

Jazz and African Rhythms – Grover Sales

"The rhythm of jazz sets it apart from other music, since rhythm has always been the most potent and body-based in the entire spectrum of sound. Gunther Schuller in his Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) claims that African rhythm is, by far, the most complicated form of music that exists. Only in the last half of this century, and only with the aid of sophisticated electronic devices, has the non-African mind been able to measure and comprehend the complexity of African rhythm. We have learned that master African drummers can sense and create differences of 1/12 second while engaged in ensemble playing that produces seven to eleven different musical lines. What is remarkable is not the number of lines, but, as Schuller notes: "in the case of a seven-part ensemble, six of the seven lines may operate in different metric patterns... staggered in such a way that the downbeats of these patterns rarely coincide.” Grover Sales, Jazz: America’s Classical Music [New York, DaCapo, 1992, 9. 27]

Jaki Byard on Pops

"I felt he was the most 'natural' man - playing, talking, singing - he was so perfectly natural that tears came to my eyes. I was very moved to be near the most natural of musicians."

John Lewis on Papa Joe Jones

“You heard the time but it wasn’t a ponderous thing that dictated where the phrases would go. The band played the arrangements and the soloists were free because the time didn’t force them into any places they didn’t want to go.”

Gerry Mulligan on Jack Teagarden

"He had everything a great Jazz musician needs to have: a beautiful sound, a wonderful melodic sense, a deep feeling, a swinging beat and the ability to make everything - even the most difficult things - sound relaxed and easy."

Louie Bellson: Drummer Extraordinaire

[Lester Young to Louie Bellson] ""Lady Bellson, just play titty-boom, titty-boom, and don't drop no bombs!"

Playboy Magazine Cartoon

Artie Shaw on Louis Armstrong As Told to Gene Lees

Artie said, "You are too young to know the impact Louis had in the 1920s," he said. "By the time you were old enough to appreciate Louis, you had been hearing those who derived from him. You cannot imagine how radical he was to all of us. Revolutionary. He defined not only how you play a trumpet solo but how you play a solo on any instrument. Had Louis Armstrong never lived, I suppose there would be a jazz, but it would be very different."

Pops

"You really can't play anything that Louis hasn't played, I mean, even modern." Miles Davis